The Story of Vinegar

The story of vinegar is a microcosm of what happened to food at large: outsourced to corporations, industrialized, and stripped of its soul. We are vinegar makers, and our mission is to break free from conditioning and remember that we are capable of extraordinary acts of curiosity. The truth we are here to expose is this: there are no rules.

 A long, long time ago, each village, each town and in some cases, each home had a vinegar maker. Now we all buy apple cider vinegar or white distilled. If a recipe calls for it, maybe we’ll pick up some rice or red wine vinegar. Most balsamic sold in America aren’t even real balsamic. And many generic store-brand apple cider vinegars aren’t even made from apples juice.

So, what happened to vinegar?
The same thing that happened to almost everything we use in our daily lives, even down to the salt on our tables: industrialization.

For most of human history, vinegar was local, seasonal, and diverse. Every community that grew fruit, grains, or honey could turn them into vinegar, partly for preservation, partly as a culinary staple, and as medicine. The flavor of a village’s vinegar reflected its orchards, its climate, and its microbes. Remember just a couple decades ago when we were all eating the same store-bought bread brands? Now there’s a movement toward micro-bakeries and home bakers sharing with their communities. The same fate could be in store for vinegar.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, companies discovered how to make vinegar quickly and cheaply by using industrial alcohol, sometimes from wood, sometimes from cheap grains. Instead of fermenting whole ingredients like fruit, which takes months or years, they accelerated the process to just days. Huge tanks, aerators, and fans blasted oxygen through the alcohol to oxidize it faster. The result was sharp, uniform, and cheap. But to be honest, it’s not really fit for human consumption.

At the same time, distribution and branding changed the way we buy food. Supermarkets don’t want dozens of small-batch vinegars from local makers; they want uniform, shelf-stable products with big margins. So instead of unique local traditions, we got a handful of dominant categories: white, apple cider, balsamic (usually fake), rice, and red wine. Diversity collapsed into sameness. We all recognize the big vinegar brands lined up on the shelf.

And this isn’t just vinegar, it’s food in general. Big brands and big marketing. We’ve all been targeted. Sometimes it’s well-intentioned, sometimes not, but the result is the same: we stopped paying attention. Think about cereals, they’re now “removing chemicals” that were in there for decades. How did we not notice? We trusted that someone had our best interests at heart.

These days, our personal rule of thumb is simple: if the package is covered in branding and marketing, we steer clear.

That’s the thing: most products are mostly marketing. What you believe will happen to your body when you eat this or wear that. But vinegar doesn’t need a marketing team.

It isn’t a new CPG invention; it was a discovery made thousands of years ago, a natural consequence of time, oxygen, and alcohol.

Wine sloshing in half-filled barrels on ships turned to vinegar. Merchants traveling the Mediterranean noticed that if an amphora of wine was left uncapped, it transformed into something sour but useful. Instead of waste, it became preservation. Red wine vinegar was born, an accident embraced.

In Asia, rice wine met the same fate. Clay jars of rice wine left open to the air soured into rice vinegar. It became central to pickles, dipping sauces, and the balance of flavors in cooking.

In the Americas, the same thing was in store for apples. Hard cider was everywhere in colonial times, and naturally, apple cider vinegar was too. It flavored food, cleaned wounds, and served as a tonic.

In the Philippines, coconut wine quickly turned to vinegar. Families would bring home fresh coconut nectar specifically to ferment and oxidize it into the vinegar they used every day.

All over the world, every community had its own version, dates, honey, palm, berries, grains. There are even depictions from ancient Egypt and Greece honoring their vinegar vats. Vinegar was alive, local, and diverse.

The story of vinegar is really the story of how we lost our village makers and home makers. It’s a microcosm of what happened to food at large: outsourced

But we don’t have to accept that. Let’s take back our curiosity. Let’s re-localize, re-diversify, and remember that food should carry the taste of its time and place. While some of us may already be growing and preserving our own food, many of us still rely on the food supply chain. But that doesn’t mean we can’t give it the essence of time and place; we can get creative in the way we process it. We can ferment the store-bought cherry juice turning it into a probiotic soda, the local microbes in the air will aid in the fermentation process making it uniquely your own local creation. We can peel, soak and ferment our potatoes so that they are prepared in such a way that is best for our bodies. And those veggies that may have been monocropped, well we can lacto-ferment those with salt to break down any antinutrients and bring back the living microbes. Perhaps use naturally fermented fruit vinegars in your water to bring it back to life. Although the things we buy from the store may be sterile, if we buy the raw ingredients, it gives us a chance to be creative with what we have. We hope this reminds you to break the rules - forage the wild foods, drink rainwater straight from the sky, and start fermenting you’re food!

And the most important thing of all if you were taught not to, then its probably the very thing you should do.

We hope you are curious! For more breaking the matrix with Sour Flower, check out our YouTube channel.